The current trend in the market for playing audiovisual content embodying intellectual property rights, such as for example, movies or music, is oriented towards developing a series of DRM (Digital Rights Management) technologies, whereby users pay to view content without receiving advertising as part of the content. This principle is the basis for so-called VOD (Video on Demand), virtual stores that sell content over the Internet, and payment or PPP (Pay-Per-View) IP televisions where payment is made to see certain content.
The content producers and distributors that use this principle of payment for content have suffered seriously as a result of the development of P2P networks (Peer-to-Peer) which allow the exchange of content files free-of-charge, whereby the user viewing the content does not pay any fee. There are currently numerous P2P networks, such as for example, eMule, Area Galaxy and Bittorrent, which have been very widely disseminated. P2P transmissions are systems that take advantage of the upload bandwidth available from each user who receives a file, for sharing the file. As a result, each user that receives data from a file may send the same data to other users. This leads to the creation of a network of users who exchange data that makes up a file, instead of each user downloading the complete file from a provider site.
The owners of the intellectual property rights of files distributed over P2P networks have filed numerous lawsuits in several countries for the purpose of closing down P2P networks. In an effort to avoid the servers managing the P2P networks being shut-down by police or other official or legal bodies, P2P networks have evolved in two ways: technologically and legally. From a technological perspective, “pure” P2P networks have appeared in which there are no servers that can be shut down by a court or police action. These new networks employ new technologies, such as for example, DHT (DHT Distributed Hash Tables) tables, which enable networks to operate without any server; hence there is no central point where the officials can stop the operation of the network. Stopping a pure P2P network requires freezing all its nodes or a large proportion of them. This greatly impedes the effectiveness of legal actions aimed at shutting down these networks. From a legal perspective, new P2P networks have appeared, such as Bit Torrent, where the servers do not contain any file with intellectual property rights but only contain “bit torrent” files containing information about the P2P network points from which parts of a file which are covered by intellectual property rights can be downloaded, and it is debatable whether supplying a single “bit torrent” file is illegal.
The debate as to the legality of P2P networks must, in addition, take into account the legal uses of these networks, such as for downloading files whose owners have consented to the downloading: software demonstration versions, open code software, content under the Creative Commons license and others. For these reasons, the current legal situation regarding P2P networks is not very clear and varies from country to country.
In contrast to the payment for content system, which, as explained has been seriously harmed by the recent appearance of P2P technologies, there is conventional television which broadcasts openly, and for which users do not have to pay to view content. Conventional television employs an advertising system whereby the television channel offers advertisers a reserved space in its broadcasts for inserting advertisements, and the cost of each advertisement is a function of its duration and the forecast audience at the time it is broadcast. In addition, projections about the type of audience, that is to say, the profile of the projected viewer, make it possible to adjust the type of advertisement for each channel and time slot. This same advertising system is currently used in cable-type digital television, with the difference that because a large number of thematic channels are available, it is possible to foresee a more precise typical viewer profile for each channel.
The extensive propagation of the Internet and the sudden surge of P2P networks have not significantly affected this conventional system of television advertising, which continues to function without experiencing the sustained income falls which are affecting the sales of music and films in CD and DVD formats. There appears to be a quite extensive and accepted social behavior of viewing commercial television channels that interleave advertising into their content to finance broadcasts, and this model has greater social acceptance by users than a pay for content system.
There is considerable interest in applying the principles of conventional television advertising to the area of Internet downloads, that is to say a user accesses audiovisual content in exchange for viewing an advertisement. As has been stated, this system has greater social acceptance than the pay-per-view system and makes it possible to adequately remunerate intellectual property right owners.
However, for a similar system to function satisfactorily for Internet downloads, technical solutions are required that allow, on the one hand, the widespread dissemination of audiovisual content provided via the Internet and, on the other, to enable an agile participation of the different participants: download sites, advertisers, users and owners of intellectual property rights. Both conditions are necessary for a system like this applied to Internet downloads to be sufficiently effective and to allow it to be implemented in practice.
Companies advertising products or services on the Internet try to ensure that their website can be found as easily as possible by a user surfing the network and who is interested in their products or services. A known method to reach this objective consists of advertising the products on content websites that attracts users interested in a specific theme. These content websites can be, for example, thematic pages about video games, cinema, music, computer programs, etc. The advertisements are available as advertising insertions including a link, so that when the user clicks on one of the links he is redirected to the web page of the selling company that has placed the advertisement and the latter pays remuneration for the content web pages, as a function of the number of clicks made on the links.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,948,061 discloses an application of this method whereby advertisers deliver their advertisements to a server as advertising insertions for the latter to select which web pages are most appropriate for hosting each advertising insertion. The web pages that ascribe to this system contain a reference causing the browser of a user visiting said web page to contact the server, whereupon the latter sends an advertising insertion to the browser, for example as an advertising strip or “banner,” so that the browser displays it on the user's computer screen. In selecting the advertising insertion that it sends to the browser, the server uses the information obtained from the user's browser, including identification of the web page that the user has visited, and information about the user (such as the Internet address from which he activates the browser and other data that the user has accessed to communicate). If the user clicks on the advertising insertion, the browser contacts the server again, and is redirected to the advertiser's web page by the server.
A more developed application of this method, which is more efficient with respect to the way in which the relationship between companies selling products or services, and the content web pages is organized, and also with respect to the technical implementation of the inclusion of advertising insertions into web pages and the remuneration according to the clicks made, is the Google “AdSense” system described in US patent applications published as US2004/0093327 and US2004/0059708. This system enables a web page to include advertising from several advertisers and to receive remuneration for it. The “AdSense” system analyses the content of the web pages that wants to host advertising insertions and decides which web pages are the most appropriate for each advertising insertion. The advertising insertions contain a link to the advertiser's web page. Each time a user clicks one of these advertising insertions, the web page owner hosting the advertising insertion receives remuneration from the advertiser. This AdSense system has a great advantage in that it enables companies to advertise on web pages whose content is related to its products and which will therefore be the most visited by users potentially interested in those products. Nevertheless, it has a drawback in that it does not effectively prevent fraudulent clicks produced when owners click on advertising insertions in their own web pages for the sole purpose of increasing the remuneration paid to them by the advertiser. Another form of fraudulent clicks consists of a company repeatedly clicking on the advertising insertion of another company for the sole purpose of quickly reaching the maximum budget fixed for that advertising insertion and causing its automatic deactivation. The fraudulent clicks problem seriously harms both the advertisers, who pay for useless clicks, and the owners of the web pages who host the advertising insertions. For this reason, some advertisers forego this system or are disposed to pay less for advertising insertions. Resolving this problem within the AdSense system would require detecting situations where a click is repeated several times from the same IP address and providing a procedure for deciding whether or not fraudulent clicks are involved. For reasons obvious to a person expert in this area, such a solution complicates the operation of the system. Another disadvantage of the AdSense system is that it does not respond to specific problems posed by the downloading of digital files with intellectual property rights.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,363,356 describes a system that offers a solution applicable to the distribution of software online with the option of trying before buying. This system permits the advertiser to only pay for clicks that have actually led to a software sale. To do this, when a user clicks an advertising insertion and is redirected to the web page of the software company, the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) address of the web page hosting the advertising insertion is included in the redirection. This information is received and stored by the server hosting the web page of the software company, and is added to the digital file, when the user downloads it. Thus, when the user re-contacts the web page of the software company to purchase a software user-license, it is possible to know which web page contained the advertising insertion resulting in the license purchase. This system has not received market acceptance because it exhibits various drawbacks. A first drawback consists of the fact that it is not designed for universal application: each advertising company must implement its own way of relating to several content web pages and including advertising insertions in them. A second disadvantage with this system is that, to add the URL address of the referenced web page to the downloaded file, the file is encapsulated by “wrapper” and the information is added to the latter. The user does not directly download the digital file selected, but rather the wrapper containing it. This necessitates a recompiling process prior to downloading and therefore a waiting time is introduced that is excessively long in comparison to accepted download times on the Internet. A third disadvantage of this system is that it does not contemplate the case where the downloading is direct, that is to say, from a content web page offering downloads, such as for example, the www.tucows.com web page.
As has been seen, the known technical solutions are not satisfactory. For this reason, current audiovisual content distribution systems only offer the option of paying to view content, with the result, as before explained, that many users opt to download the content from P2P networks, thus denying intellectual property right owners the ability to receive remuneration.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,152,091 discloses an advertising method applied to downloading content via the Internet consisting of displaying an advertisement on the user's browser while he is downloading the content. The download is cut-off if the user interrupts the display of advertising on his browser. This method has the drawback that it is not very effective in practice, in that users are not accustomed to staying in front of the computer during the time taken by the download. With the technology currently available for the majority of users, the downloading of a 400 Mbyte video takes approximately four hours, in which case the user normally initiates a download and goes away to do other things. In addition, the method described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,152,091 does not make it possible to check that the user is actually viewing the advertisements. Even assuming that the user remains in front of the computer, he can minimize the browser window where the advertisements are displayed and continue performing other tasks on the computer.